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Day #201: The Haunting in Connecticut (2009)

[From IMDb:] After a family is forced to relocate for their son’s health, they begin experiencing supernatural behavior in their new home, and uncover a sinister history.

My take:

The spelling of Connecticut confuses me. Have I been mishearing it all these years, or has the country of phonetic spelling really just randomly thrown an extra C into a word for no apparent reason?

[Note: I Googled it; it’s the Anglicised spelling of Quonectucket/Quinnitucket. The more you know!]

Oh, right. The movie.

I just…I can’t, y’know? It’s such a lackluster movie that I’m finding it hard to come up with a long way of saying ‘meh,’ which doesn’t just involve adding a lot of e’s. Mostly because I keep a track of my word count rather than my character count, and – oh, look at me avoiding the subject some more, because meeeeeeeeh.

You should thank me for not making a thing out of the fact that Virginia Madsen looks a lot like Ronee Blakley, who was Nancy’s mother in A Nightmare on Elm Street; and that Kyle Gallner, who plays Matt Campbell in this movie, is also in the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, creating this funny little web of connection between the three movies. Or you could have, if I hadn’t just milked a paragraph out of the Googling-hole that I fell into while this movie played in the background.

If you get the impression that I’m phoning in on this post, then you know exactly how I feel about the performances in this movie. Kyle Gallner is fine, I suppose, but everyone else is just…on screen. Like, they’re all there in the physical sense, reciting the anemic collection of words that someone decided to call a script, but you can tell that they’re thinking to themselves that this is not where they expected to be at this point in their careers.

It doesn’t surprise me that the “true story” that this movie is based on is considered to be a poorly constructed rip-off of The Amityville Horror, because that’s exactly what it feels like. With particular emphasis on the “poorly constructed” part.